But why talk of refuge? Who needs it, if the refuge spoken of be a city or a castle, into which men fly for safety? It is all sunlight here. No sound of war in our streets. We do not hear the rush of armed men against the doors of our dwellings. We do not come with weapons to church. Our lives are not at the mercy of an assassin. Why, then, talk of refuge?
Alas! I stand before a company of imperiled men. No flock of sheep was ever so threatened or endangered of a pack of wolves; no ship was ever so beaten of a storm; no company of men were ever so environed of a band of savages. A refuge you must have, or fall before an all-devouring destruction. There are not so many serpents in Africa; there are not so many hyenas in Asia; there are not so many panthers in the forest, as there are transgressions attacking my soul. I will take the best unregenerated man anywhere, and say to him, You are utterly corrupt. If all the sins of your past life were marshaled in single file, they would reach from here to hell. If you have escaped all other sins, the fact that you have rejected the mission of the Son of God is enough to condemn you forever, pushing you off into bottomless darkness, struck by ten thousand hissing thunder-bolts of Omnipotent wrath.
You are a sinner. The Bible says it, and your conscience affirms it. Not a small sinner, or a moderate sinner, or a tolerable sinner, but a great sinner, a protracted sinner, a vile sinner, an outrageous sinner, a condemned sinner. As God, with His all-scrutinizing gaze, looks upon you to-day, He can not find one sound spot in your soul. Sin has put scales on your eyes, and deadened your ear with an awful deafness, and palsied your right arm, and stunned your sensibilities, and blasted you with an infinite blasting. The Bible, which you admit to be true, affirms that you are diseased from the crown of your head to the sole of your foot. You are unclean; you are a leper. Believe not me, but believe God's Word, that over and over again announces, in language that a fool might understand, the total and complete depravity of the unchanged heart: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked."
In addition to the sins of your life there are uncounted troubles in pursuit of you. Bereavements, losses, disappointments are a flock of vultures ever on the wing. Did you get your house built, and furnished, and made comfortable any sooner than misfortune came in without knocking, and sat beside you—a skeleton apparition? Have not pains shot their poisoned arrows, and fevers kindled their fire in your brain? Many of you, for years, have walked on burning marl. You stepped out of one disaster into another. You may, like Job, have cursed the day in which you were born. This world boils over with trouble for you, and you are wondering where the next grave will gape, and where the next storm will burst. Oh, ye pursued, sinning, dying, troubled, exhausted souls, are you not ready now to hear me while I tell you of Christ, the Refuge?
A soldier, during the war, heard of the sickness of his wife and asked for a furlough. It was denied him, and he ran away. He was caught, brought back, and sentenced to be shot as a deserter. The officer took from his pocket a document that announced his death on the following morning. As the document was read, the man flinched not and showed no sorrow or anxiety. But the officer then took from his pocket another document that contained the prisoner's pardon. Then he broke down with deep emotion at the thought of the leniency that had been extended. Though you may not appear moved while I tell you of the law that thundered its condemnation, while I tell you of the pardon and the peace of the Gospel I wonder if they will not overcome you.
Jesus is a safe refuge. Fort Hudson, Fort Pulaski, Fort Moultrie, Fort Sumter, Gibraltar, Sebastopol were taken. But Jesus is a castle into which the righteous runneth and is safe. No battering-ram can demolish its wall. No sappers or miners can explode its ramparts, no storm-bolt of perdition leap upon its towers. The weapons that guard this fort are omnipotent. Hell shall unlimber its great guns as death only to have them dismantled. In Christ our sins are pardoned, discomforted, blotted out, forgiven. An ocean can not so easily drown a fly as the ocean of God's forgiveness swallow up, utterly and forever, our transgressions. He is able to save unto the uttermost.
You who have been so often overcome in a hand-to-hand fight with the world, the flesh, and devil, try this fortress. Once here, you are safe forever. Satan may charge up the steep, and shout amid the uproar of the fight, Forward, to his battalions of darkness; but you will stand in the might of the great God, your Redeemer, safe in the refuge. The troubles of life, that once overwhelmed you, may come on with their long wagon-trains laden with care and worryment; and you may hear in their tramp the bereavements that once broke your heart; but Christ is your friend, Christ your sympathizer, Christ your reward. Safe in the refuge!
Death at last may lay the siege to your spirit, and the shadows of the sepulcher may shake their horrors in the breeze, and the hoarse howl of the night wind may be mingled with the cry of despair, yet you will shout in triumph from the ramparts, and the pale horse shall be hurled back on his haunches. Safe in the refuge! To this castle I fly. This last fire shall but illumine its towers; and the rolling thunders of the judgment will be the salvo of its victory.
Just after Queen Victoria had been crowned—she being only nineteen or twenty years of age—Wellington handed her a death-warrant for her signature. It was to take the life of a soldier in the army. She said to Wellington: "Can there nothing good be said of this man?" He said: "No; he is a bad soldier, and deserves to die." She took up the death-warrant, and it trembled in her hand as she again asked: "Does no one know anything good of this man?" Wellington said: "I have heard that at his trial a man said that he had been a good son to his old mother." "Then let his life be spared," said the queen, and she ordered his sentence commuted.
Christ is on a throne of grace. Our case is brought before him. The question is asked: "Is there any good about this man?" The law says: "None." Justice says: "None." Our own conscience says: "None." Nevertheless, Christ hands over our pardon, and asks us to take it. Oh, the height and depth, the length and breadth of his mercy!